Title: In the absence of light
Rating, genres, universe: Pg13/teen, drama/angst/general/supernatural/horror/romance, canon-ish
Warnings: profanity, mild mature themes, boy x boy love
Summary: Being able to see those no longer alive redraws the lines of Naruto's reality.
Author's note 1: I confess. It's odd. Hope you'll like it, ... doubt that you will.
x;
In the absence of light
... I see you.
i.
They are sitting on the edge of a crater, tons of displaced dirt and rock and rubble strewn around them. And god, blood.
Naruto avoids looking out at it all directly. Naruto looks at the blue nondescript sky instead and thinks of Sasuke briefly before he shoves the traitor out of his mind. Meanwhile, Konohamaru is talking, talking, and Naruto soon supposes it might be well for him to pay attention.
Naruto wonders wearily if he was ever like that as he patiently listens to Konohamaru's torrent of somewhat-coherent-but-not-very words. He closes his eyes, because he is dead tired and his vision hurts, and perhaps because he wants to ignore the world. He opens them to the sky as he hears a darker, more desperate tone seep into the younger one's babbling.
"Naruto-niichan," Konohamaru says hesitantly in a funny voice. "We thought you were dead." The last word is hushed and something-else, and Naruto can tell that the dark-haired genin is really shaken.
We thought you were dead.
We thought you were dead.
Fuck, we thought you were dead.
It doesn't fail to make Naruto instantly guilty, and turns his gaze to Konohamaru, who right now looks far younger than his fifteen years.
"I'm still very much here, kiddo." Naruto mutters in his usual brushing-off-the-munchkins voice, but he puts a hand on Konohamaru's shoulder, comfort that Konohamaru would never ask for but would never balk from.
"You can't get rid of me that easily, brat," Naruto tries again, and this time his voice could pass for almost-cheerful, considering the circumstances.
Konohamaru doesn't smile.
Naruto himself smiles hollowly. He is tired and there are lines on his face that should not be, and his eyes are just a little too scarlet still.
He stretches his fingers, wonders if he's just fancying that the Kyuubi's power is still tingling in his limbs. Actually, Naruto thought, it was a shame. He'd refrained from using that raw and explosive- and hated- demon strength for so long… but now…
Konohamaru's mouth starts going again. "Shit, Naruto-niichan, there was that… explosion and everything was a weird red and then Moegi said that she couldn't see anymore, and then we-" The boy is ashen white under the grime and the sweat and the blood caked in the dark hair.
Naruto looks over to the rest of the team. Carrot-haired Moegi is not crying- 'good girl,' Naruto thinks, proud- and is dutifully tending to the barely conscious Udon, who took the worst beating out of the three genin.
"You guys did great," Naruto says. Then, "I'm sorry you had to see that."
The three look at him with wide, wide eyes and Naruto thinks maybe they finally realize what vile power he had to call upon to save their skins.
ii.
It starts with a vague paranoia. Movements, tricks of light, and paranoia, paranoia, paranoia. Naruto's hand is constantly reaching for kunai that is never far from his reach. Mornings begin with him waking up with his fingers curled tightly around the sharp metal edge.
And then, Naruto's eyes- just at the edges of his vision- started catching sight of shadows. But they were shadows without something to cast them. It scared the hell out of him.
He thinks that maybe, maybe he's finally going crazy.
Naruto tells himself to give it one more week and then he'll go to Tsunade, or someone. After all, he's yet to decide if it was some sick freak trying to harass him. With illusion. That would be a new one. The people who hated usually went for the wreck-his-apartment, throw-rocks-at-him.
The loathing that people lavished on him usually manifested itself in crude artless ways. Nothing as much as the lingering, elegant toying of his mind and courage, nothing so delicate and psychological as the moving dark shapes that he is beginning to think are following his every step.
But fuck, did he hope it was the simple matter of someone having a personal vendetta against him.
And god, please let him not be going crazy.
Even as Naruto is sitting in bed desperately hoping for this, dark shapeless things slink around at the corners of his room.
iii.
It's late, and the skies are heavy and dark and the clouds are gracefully swirled across the black expanse.
The lone jounin on the main road leading into the village is the bright-haired and bright-eyed young man with a smile on his face, but his smile is tightly stretched across his features. It's because Naruto Uzumaki is finding it harder to conjure a genuine grin, these days.
Naruto approaches the Konohagakure gates with a rhythmic step. He's glad to be home from his brief solo escort mission. There was something worse about having shadows following him when he didn't know where particularly he was. He waves as jauntily as he can to the guy at the desk, and walks up for standard identification.
"Hey, Uzumaki-san," the guy says.
No, Naruto sees that he was wrong. There isn't one, but two guys at the desk tonight. The one who didn't greet him looks forlorn, bitter.
He struggles to put names to faces, and he succeeds in remembering the name of the young man who spoke. "Yo, Daichi-san." He nods to the other one whose name eluded him. Daichi gives Naruto a puzzled look, and flicks a glance to the side, where the silent man is standing.
Frowning slightly, Daichi nevertheless pursues some amiable small talk as he scrawls in the necessary forms documenting arrivals. "Tough mission? You look tired, Naruto-san," Daichi says sympathetically.
"Nothing fazes Uzumaki Naruto!" Naruto proclaims half-heartedly as Daichi chuckles and shakes his head. Naruto says conversationally, "And aren't you guys tired as well? Man, night shift sucks."
"Guys?" Daichi's frown deepens. "Naruto-san, I'm the only one here."
Suddenly there's a clawing feeling at Naruto's chest when Naruto looks where he had seen the second man.
There's no one there anymore.
iii.
Naruto knows that he isn't going to sleep, after he makes a stumbling idiotic excuse to Daichi and quickly escapes the young man's stare.
"I'll go see Tsunade-baba tomorrow." He promises to the darkness of his very still apartment.
iv.
When morning comes, Naruto is heading toward the Hokage's tower, trying to forget what he thinks he saw coming out of his apartment- 'holyfuckno I did not just see that'- when Sakura spots him from across the street and crosses the said street to say hello.
The sight of the girl- formerly team member and crush, currently one of his dearest friends- and the way the sunlight illuminates her somewhat gaudily colored hair, the way her green eyes glimmer at him with affection, the way the pretty heart-shaped face presents the familiar smile- Naruto feels like he's a man who's been away for twenty years recently come home.
Something like love and strangled relief smack Naruto in the face as he hastily, happily greets Sakura with "Sakura-chan!" Only his voice comes out kind of odd and rough and weird, and immediately, he knows Sakura wouldn't miss that. And with another peek at her face, Naruto knows that Sakura is suspicious already.
"Naruto…?" she murmurs doubtfully, green eyes searching his face.
Naruto knows that he looks like he hasn't slept. "I'm okay, I swear, Sakura-chan!" Naruto says quickly. "Don't look at me like that, Sakura-chan." He smiles easily at her- he's always been able to smile easily at her.
"Naruto…" Sakura repeats, only this time it sounds like a warning. Any other time, Naruto would have been anticipating a whap upside that blond head of his.
"Really." Naruto reassures her.
"I don't believe you," she promptly announces, "But I'm going to walk you to the tower. That's where you're going right?"
Naruto nods and so she follows. The conversation is light and Naruto tries to keep it that way, turning verbal corners whenever anything like concern started underlining Sakura's voice. By the time they were almost there, Naruto is getting the feeling that Sakura is getting a little frustrated with his determination to not tell her anything.
Naruto wants to tell her everything, really he does. But he fears the way Sakura might look at him when he tells her that he's been seeing things, and the things were following him. He fears losing Sakura as well.
Naruto is nineteen years old, and he's already lost his family- whoever they might have been- and his best friend, and most recently, he thinks he's lost his sanity as well. And Naruto hopes to god that Tsunade-baba can fix whatever the hell was wrong with him.
Naruto is close enough to see way the red-painted roof of the Hokage's tower stood clearly distinct against the fiercely blue sky, when he sees someone that he knows, and someone he knows shouldn't be seen in Konohagakure.
Naruto's feet refuse to move, and his legs become heavier than lead when he sees the blonde ponytail and the pale blue eyes and the as-always classically beautiful face of Yamanaka Ino.
The way Naruto's throat constricts is very, very tightly, and Sakura is staring at him curiously and worriedly, wondering why they stopped. Naruto is having a problem breathing, and Sakura moves to touch his arm. It almost scares the young woman when she sees the wide blue eyes of her friend the most scared she's ever seen them.
Ino is walking towards them, and Naruto has a feeling it's not impersonation, it's not illusion.
His heart feels concrete and it's banging painfully and slowly.
"Sakura-chan." He swallows hard. His voice is terribly raspy. "I see Ino-chan."
Sakura steps back from him, and she looks like she's been slapped.
"…the fuck, Naruto?" she stammers, immediately angry and hurt. "What kind of sick joke- what sick shit are you-" Tears are welling in her eyes as she steps forward again and Naruto vaguely reads the vehemence in her pretty face.
Naruto barely notices when his world fades to blackness as Sakura's fist meets his face hard. The impact, his sleeplessness, and the sheer strain of his crazy, spiraling life- it takes him down, right there on the pavement, on the street.
Naruto slumps down, and the last thing he sees before he can't see anymore is Ino's beautiful face and the gentleness that's etched upon it. Naruto's last thought is that Ino's face was never so sweet when she was alive.
v.
When Naruto opens his eyes an hour later, he is rather relieved when it's not Ino's face that he sees, it's Sakura's. He flinches a little, though, in memory of the recent punch, even when the lovely face in front of him no longer holds any anger. Instead, Sakura's face is wet with tears, and her eyes are so worried- about me, Naruto realizes- that Naruto feels his own heart breaking a little.
Come to think of it, Naruto thinks rather inanely, my heart feels like it's beating slower than usual.
Naruto forgets about his heart when he realizes where he is: on some sort of makeshift bed of blankets, in Tsunade-baba's office. His faces aches where Sakura hit him, and he feels dizzy, but Naruto makes himself sit up, and finds that Tsunade is looking at him from where she sits at here desk.
He manages a grin for the Godaime, but Tsunade doesn't smile back.
Sakura is kneeling next to him on the hardwood floor, and she's still half-crying.
"Sakura-chan told me you saw Yamanaka," Tsunade says quietly as she moves toward the blond young man sitting on her office floor.
"I've been seeing some strange shit lately," Naruto confesses, looking away from the buxom woman who had all but adopted him in the way she cared for him, looked out for him.
Tsunade looks at Naruto, looks at Sakura, and looks back at Naruto.
"Elaborate.'" Tsunade demands.
vi.
When Naruto finishes, Tsuande looks like she desperately wants a drink, and Sakura looks like she's still in some sort of numb state. Naruto almost wants to cry, but his blue orbs remain dry throughout the recounting.
There is a silence that deadens the atmosphere, before-
"I think it has to do with Kyuubi," Naruto offers at last. "It started after I substituted as leader of Ebisu's team, and we got attacked by S-Class on our mission. And I used the Kyuubi's chakra- like, a lot of it, and I started seeing stuff…" Naruto lets his word trail and die, and he feels very, very cold.
Tsunade begins a brisk, businesslike tone, starts her words quick and fast. "We'll need to begin testing on you, brat. We've got to check if someone's messing with your bodily systems, whether it be by poison or god knows what, and if not, we'll run you through some psychological tests and see if we can-"
The words reach Naruto, but he really doesn't hear them. "No." Naruto says roughly, harshly. It's not directed to the two women in the room, the two women who are the most important females in his life, but it's at the whole predicament, the whole mess that this has become.
"Tsunade-baba, I don't think anything's wrong with me physically." Naruto's lips twist into a darkly humorous smile, out of place on his sunny features. "And mentally, well, I don't know if I was ever right up there, but I don't think that's the case."
Naruto pauses, and turns to Sakura, expression softer. "Sorry, Sakura-chan. I didn't mean to upset you," he tells her honestly, and she's nodding slightly because after the story Naruto told, Sakura thinks she knows what Naruto knows. The impossibilities are overwhelming to her natural logic- but she also thinks that she… agrees.
"What are you saying?" Tsunade is gripping the edge of her desk now, and she's close to something like alarm-
"This morning," Naruto says, very quietly, "I think I saw the Yondaime, in my apartment." He takes a breath. "Don't you see? The people I'm seeing- they're no longer here. They're no longer alive. Tsunade-baba, I'm fucking seeing dead people."
Tsunade tells him not to jump to conclusions, but the Godaime looks very, very pale.
x;
Author's note 2: I don't know...! If you made it all the way down, thank you. This story feels awkward to me... I think I'll rewrite it in the past tense. But thank you, hope you liked. Feedback would be very much appreciated.